Arthur Murray Biography

American entrepreneur Arthur Murray (1895–1991) became a
household name with the chain of dance schools he founded early in the
twentieth century.

Once a shy, uneasy teenager, Murray believed that social dancing was the
key to an improved self-image, and his business strategy often targeted
those in need of a little encouragement. His schools, staffed by
well-trained instructors, also featured easy-to-learn methods for a wide
array of touch-dancing—the term for two-person dance floor
couplings such as the waltz and the polka—at a time when dancing
was a obligatory part of nearly all social interaction for teens and
adults. By the time he formally retired in 1969, the Arthur Murray
International Dance Schools had grown into a lucrative worldwide franchise
and had earned their founder millions.

Arthur Murray Teichman was born on April 4, 1895, in New York City, to
Jewish immigrant parents who had come from Austria a year earlier. The
family lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, home to many poor
émigrés who had also fled anti-Semitism in Europe, and
Murray's father, Abraham, found work selling bread from a street
vendor's cart. Within a few years, he and his wife, Sara, opened a
bakery in East Harlem, far to the north of the city, but the family still
struggled financially to provide for Arthur and the four children who
followed him. Murray was a sickly child, and grew into a shy teenager who
was embarrassed by his family's lack of financial security.
Realizing that being a good dancer could easily boost his popularity with
young women from any social milieu, he asked a female friend to teach him
how, and quickly realized he had a gift for it. For extra practice he
sometimes crashed weddings, where he found non-stop music and an abundance
of female guests looking for a dance floor partner.

Trained at Castle House

Murray dropped out of Morris High School in the Bronx, one of the
city's top public high schools at the time, and took a job with an
architect, planning to become one himself. He also took drafting courses
at Cooper Union, a private college in the city that offered adult
education

programs for students from low-income backgrounds. The dance floor still
lured, however, and he quit both job and college when he won a waltz
contest in 1912. He found work instead as a dance instructor with the G.
Hepburn Wilson Dance Studios, which was busy capitalizing on a raft of new
dance crazes that young urbanites picked up and then just as quickly
abandoned for new ones. The dances went by memorable names such as the
bunny hug, grizzly bear, kangaroo dip, and turkey trot, and required some
instructional how-to, which businesses like the Wilson Dance Studio
offered cheaply.

In addition to his regular job, Murray also spent several more hours of
each day training at a school for dance instructors run by
husband-and-wife team Vernon and Irene Castle. Vernon (1887–1918)
and Irene (1893–1969) had lived in Paris, where they first gained
fame and ignited a craze for American ragtime music and the dances that
went with it, and they went on to appearances on vaudeville and in
Hollywood films. Both were major celebrities by the time that Murray
enrolled at Castle House, their school on Long Island. There he met
Baroness de Kuttleson, a well-known dance instructor in her time, and went
with her to Asheville, North Carolina, a popular resort for the wealthy.
Around this time, he heeded de Kuttleson's advice to drop his
German-sounding "Teichman" surname, because World War I was
underway and a wave of anti-German sentiment had swept across much of
America.

The partnership between Murray and the Baroness was short-lived, ending
when he learned that she charged one tycoon's wife $50 for each
lesson Murray gave the woman, but paid him only $5. He headed to Atlanta,
where he enrolled once again in college but this time pursued a business
management degree. To pay his tuition and living expenses, he found a job
as a dance teacher at one of the city's most elegant hotels, the
Georgian Terrace. His classes for children and teenagers proved so
successful that he soon had nearly a thousand pupils, and was featured in
a Forbes magazine article titled "This College Student Earns
$15,000 a Year."

Sold Mail Order Course

Murray's first dance studio of his own was located in Atlanta, and
local radio broadcasts of his dance instruction boosted his business
prospects. Hoping to keep up with the demand, he tried selling a mail
order package that included dance instruction along with a kinetoscope,
which was a small motion picture exhibition device. He lost money when the
kinetoscopes proved too fragile for the mail, and then their manufacturer
went out of business. A second idea proved to be the winning one, however:
recalling his architecture classes and the precise drawings he made in his
drafting job, he sketched out diagrams for the footsteps of various
dances, with the feet in silhouette and lines and arrows illustrating the
correct movements. He named his business the Arthur Murray Correspondence
School of Dancing, and solicited customers by running ads in pulp
magazines and the Hollywood gossip weeklies. The venture proved so
profitable that he had moved back to New York City by 1923, opened an
office, and hired a staff to keep up with the demand.

Murray also opened a dance studio in the city, and began franchising his
more professionally geared instructional materials to hotels across the
United States. Again, he showed a knack for writing advertising copy, and
his school ads began to feature faux first-person testimonials under
headlines such as "They Gave Me the Ha-Ha When I Stepped Out Onto
the Dance Floor," "Thirty Days Ago They Laughed at
Me," and "How I Became Popular Overnight."
Murray's business thrived over the next decade, but he shut down
the mail order division when demand fell off during the Great Depression.
By this time he had married Kathryn Kohnfelder, a schoolteacher from New
Jersey, and the escalating success of his empire enabled them to move to
Mount Vernon, an affluent Westchester County suburb of New York City.
Years later, he and his wife revealed that during the early years of their
marriage Kathryn had suffered from post-partum depression following the
birth of twin daughters, and once even attempted suicide.

Because of Kathryn's fragile state, the Murrays divided their time
between residences in New York and California for much of the 1930s, but
by 1938 had settled back in the New York area permanently. That same year
Murray launched another franchise business, this one also using his name,
for freestanding dance studios across the United States. Like the
instructors at his New York studio, Murray personally screened his
instructor franchisees, looking for those who could project a certain
grace and warmth, which he believed would best appeal to potential
students and
keep them committed to the courses. The first such studio opened in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, and by 1946, when he formally incorporated the
franchise school business, there were 72 studios in operation that
produced total revenues of $20 million annually.

Showed Genius for Publicity

Murray's talent for promotion helped make him a household name as
far back as 1927, when he delivered a dance lesson to a student in London
via the first transatlantic telephone lines for a sum of $425. He courted
the famous to boost publicity, personally instructing First Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt (1884–1962), the Duke of Windsor (1894–1972), and
scions of American fortunes such as John D. Rockefeller Jr.
(1874–1960) and heiress Barbara Hutton (1912–1979). With the
advent of television, he shifted his radio promotion efforts to the new
medium, and Kathryn began hosting a 15-minute series on the CBS network
titled
The Arthur Murray Party
in 1950. The show proved enormously popular over the next decade,
expanding to a half-hour showcase of dancing instruction, dance contests,
and comedy skits that featured a few stars long before they were famous,
such as Johnny Carson (1925–2005). The highly rated broadcast also
served to lure new franchisees, and there were 450 schools bearing
Murray's name in 1960, the year that he and his business became the
subject of a highly publicized consumer fraud investigation.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) inquiry was launched after local
Better Business Bureau offices filed complaints that the Murray
Studios' advertising materials featured ridiculously simple
riddles. Callers dialed a telephone number to give the correct answer, and
were offered a cut-rate instruction package for answering correctly; even
those who gave a wrong answer were offered a consolation prize of classes
at a reduced rate. Murray's company was served with a
cease-and-desist order for this, but in May of 1964 he found himself the
target of some dreadfully unexpected publicity when law enforcement
authorities appeared at his Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan to take
him into custody. The arrest came because he had ignored a subpoena to
appear before a grand jury in Minnesota on a related fraud charge, but the
arrest warrant was cancelled when he agreed to testify. A few months
later, he resigned as president of Arthur Murray Dance Studios.

A year later Murray sold his controlling stake in the company to a group
of investors, but remained on board as a consultant. He formally retired
in 1969, settling in Honolulu, Hawaii, and enjoyed a lucrative second
career as a financial adviser for a coterie of affluent friends in his
social circle. He traded stocks and invested in companies from a corner of
the living room of his penthouse apartment, telling
New York Times
writer Robert Trumbull that his "telephone bill runs between
$2,000 and $3,000 a month," according to a 1980 article about his
investment savvy.

Despite the changing times, Murray's dance studios continued to
thrive in the 1960s and 1970s. They offered classes when disco dancing
became one of the most unexpected trends of the 1970s, and maintained a
steady stream of clients by appealing to couples who were planning their
weddings and realized they had little experience with touch dancing. The
company even began opening studios in Asia and the Middle East in the
1990s, which pushed revenues from $38 million in 1994 to $55 million six
years later.

Murray had passed away by then. Inactive after a 1983 tennis injury, he
died of pneumonia on March 3, 1991, in Honolulu. Kathryn Murray died eight
years later. One of their twin daughters, Jane, married the doctor who
invented the Heimlich maneuver to prevent choking deaths.

Periodicals

Investor's Business Daily
, June 29, 2004.

Miami Herald
, July 8, 2001.

New York Times
, July 2, 1939; May 9, 1960; September 21, 1980; December 4, 1981; March
4, 1991.